I'm middle-class and poor: it wasn't supposed to be this way

The word “comfort” and the middle classes used to be pretty much synonymous. Think of Jane Austen’s excessive fondness for the term: her heroines set out to achieve a generous dollop of comfort in their romantic and domestic circumstances. Most readers empathise with that quest. Indeed, you’d pretty much think the whole point of the bourgeoisie was to be comfortable, and to radiate the special brand of inner calm that comes with plentiful ISAs, Agas and en-suite bathrooms.

My late mother believed this to such an extent that she almost passed out when she found out I couldn’t afford to have my car fixed (back in 1998, when I was newly wed and my husband had told me he “didn’t believe in joint bank accounts”), and she lent me a grand on the spot. She told me that, as a principle of basic household law, “You must always have at least a thousand pounds in a secret bank account to deal with emergencies, or to use as a running-away fund.” I followed her advice until a year ago when I needed to poach the reserve for a mortgage repayment and never replaced it. This is just the inevitable result, as YouGov analysts state, of salaries staying pretty much static while living costs rise.

If other people can make a fortune with badly-iced cupcakes and crisps that cost a fiver a pop, surely we could identify a gap in the market for food that looks hand-hewn by out-of-work publishers?

I’ve just returned from a jolly weekend with a bunch of middle-aged professional types at the Hay Festival. Of the dozen or so people I spoke to on the delicate matter of personal finances, only a GP and a two tenured academics had their own pension funds; none of us could afford private school, or holidays abroad for our children. As one friend said to me mournfully, “I used to think being motivated by money was rather vulgar; but that’s when I was earning lots of moolah, back in the Nineties.”

Private school? Not a chance for today's middle classesCredit:
Getty

Much of our idle chat seemed to come straight out of E Nesbit’s classic book, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, as we tried, like the Bastables, to conjure up brilliant ways of boosting our family fortunes. Artisanal food products were our first and obvious line of enquiry. If other people can make a fortune with badly iced cupcakes and crisps that cost a fiver a pop, surely we could identify a gap in the market for food that looks hand-hewn by out-of-work publishers?

But the most obvious way of alleviating middle-class financial worries is the most traditional; a fact acknowledged by George Osborne in the last Budget, when he increased the tax-free allowance for Airbnb hosts. Rent out a room! Or why not sleep on your sofa, put your children in the workhouse and rent out the entire house?

I’ve worked out that if I put my sons in together and lose my middle-class angst about children having their own rooms, I could free up our middle-class loft for the sort of middle-class travellers, who can no longer afford hotels. We will be squished, we will be grumpy, we’ll have lost a considerable portion of comfort. But we can moan with our guests about the tragic decline in living standards. And as all Britons know, a grip shared is a gripe thoroughly enjoyed. So we’ll all feel strangely comfortable again.